Thursday, October 13, 2011

The Annual No Anchor tour of OZ! (Pt.1)

A few weeks ago No Anchor went on tour. A real, gettin' in the van type tour. We've toured before but this time we were going to do it properly. It was early on a Wednesday morning when the Kia Carnival hit the road with thousands of kilometers of highway and 10 shows over the next 12 days ahead of us.

I took a bunch of photos on my camera. Some of those are below. Ian and Donnie took their video camera... you'll see that footage sometime soon. If I can find the time, I'll chuck up my tour diary sometime soon too.

If you live in Australia, you've seen this before. It's called the open road.

Even noise rock bands need to stop off for a bit of wholesome sightseeing.

When we arrived in Geelong, we discovered that Tupac wasn't dead and that even such a working class town had some OG's!

This is 'Face On Fire'. They like blood, intestines, baby embryos, giant squirting penis's, death metal/grind, make-up and generally making a complete mess of a venue. That's how they role in Geelong.

Harmony played on our album. We we're pretty stoked about that. In Melbourne we went one better though. We got to play live with them and Dead (our friends Jem and Jase are in that band and they're also amazing) and we did it all in the best bar in the country - The Old Bar in Fitzroy.

Touring isn't all truckstop food. It's also about compulsory trips the the Veggie Bar. We ate like kings!

We saw a lot of 'big' stuff on the highway. Although the consensus was that the Bannana was only "quite large" and as for the prawn, it was condemned and falling apart. However the title for the shittest 'Big' tourist landmark goes to the oversized concrete Koala. It was so crap, we didn't even stop.

They say that the roads between Melbourne and Adelaide are dead straight and go on forever. This is even more true when doing the 10 hour drive on three hours sleep.

This is Space Bong from Adelaide. They are way better than their name suggests. In fact, they are worth driving 10 hours to the venue to experience. Donnie reckons they have "the best riff eva!" Ian and I couldn't really argue the point after their set.

By this point we had been on the road for six days and done a lot of long halls between cities. I believe I was the one to convince us to go running through the field of canola. That shit looks intense smattered amongst the arid Australian countryside.

We arrived in Woolongong only to find that our outrageous party had to be cancelled. Oh well, there's always Sydney!

The day we left home we set the odometer. As we snaked back up the east coast towards Queensland we realised we had done a lot click-o-meters.

So that was just under two weeks. We had a few days off then we played some shows with the Japanese band Mono (they were great too). This time we stepped it up and flew.

We also demanded on our riders that we have a boardroom to conduct all offical buisness between soundcheck and showtime.

I took this at the bakery in Perth. The second last show for Mono on what had become an almost two year world tour.

After the Perth show, Mono invited us out to eat a couple of hundred dollars of Szechuan Chinese. This is how much we enjoyed it!

The next day we flew from Perth back to Brisbane and marveled at the Australian outback.

Along the way we made sure that local record stores had our LP. Polyester in Melbourne now has a bunch of the second pressing. 78 Records in Perth now also has Real Pain Supernova too so if you saw any of our shows but didn't get your hands on a record, it should be easy enough to find. Alternatively, use the paypal buttons on the right hand side of this page and I'll personally send you a record (or not if you grab the fancy digital version).

And so now we're home again. Normal people would kick back and relax in the knowledge that we got to play in front of a lot of people and play alongside some of our favourite bands. But no... we might have done 13 shows in three weeks but that's going to be nothing compared to what's coming next!